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JANE'S GAME - PROLOGUE

Jane Templeton Rice, to give her full maiden name, was, as the contemporary fashion rags came to call her, a woman of classical beauty. Pre-Raphaelite was a common column inch term for her austere elegance. Her liquid spot-lit presence. All of life, they proclaimed, was a bulging orchard for her to pick idly from throughout the long and sultry day, the glowing prose of her more prosaic fashion editors.

Jane Templeton Rice, above and beyond the restriction of her obvious beauty, could seem quiet, personable, demure; some might use the worst of all four letter words, meek. But with emerald eyes like hers, with charisma on the catwalk like hers, dynamism under the spotlight, the perfect decoration for the arm of numerous millionaires, fashion modelling was the play she was born to perform.

You could imagine Jane as a gawky child all freckles and prescription glasses. Scuffing the chins of lads three years her senior with her tomboyish repartee of knees and punches. See her battling an entire school ground of spotty admirers. Only the seniors ever conquering her. The sucker for the life of charm promised by more mature liars than she. The disappointments. The little twists and turns of the knife. You could see where the almost indistinguishable worry lines emanated from. It was as if her exterior beauty was a conscious bodily evolution to mask the hurt inside.

As with all charismatic figures, and theatrical types in general, there was something not quite right about her easy switch of character from the meek and platonic private individual to hip and predatory star of the stage, her Jeckyll and her Hyde. Some external driving force. No sane person could juggle so well for so long. If the truth were told, Jane Templeton Rice was not the least bit well.

She had been a normal girl.

1) Left high school with the useless A level, Sociology.

She worked hard to find herself a suitable college to further her study. She could see herself two years down the professional county line, her heart stung by the interminable inevitability of broken home after foster parent database search, after rape crisis centre counselling, after...

2) She had a cute freckly nose and a good long pair of legs.

Lucky for her, she was head hunted in the centre of her hometown one Summer Saturday out with friends and accepted the swift job offer from Clinique, the world renowned Modelling Agency. Jane Templeton Rice, would-be sociologist in a low paid government position, garbed in woollen rags, cheap underwear and horned rim glasses, did her first $100,000 shoot at the mindless age of seventeen ..and not yet a woman.. as the song goes.

She often thought of how different her life might have been if she had continued her dead end studies: rotting in seedy lodgings, one-bar electric fire for comfort, beans on toast at each irregular sitting, working three years on her thirty thousand word dissertation, finding the only job vacancy was at the local council shifting abused wives and rickety families in and out of inadequate sheltered accommodation. Playing the numbers.

She had this comical and protracted argument with herself about life the universe and well, evolution, to be quite honest. Argued for nonsensical hours about the misrepresentation of Evolution, the so-called survival of the fittest, projected by the media. Wept openly at the thought of life forms who 'knew' it was their time to change suddenly discarding their gills and leaping up on to land to breathe the air. She had visions of some pre-historic dog some few thousand years later scavenging along the seashore and suddenly bouncing into the surf as a dolphin on some evolutionary whim. Had this really solid heart to heart with the mirror in her hotel suite the day before the Gaultier Show in Guatemala. Tribal Dolphin, the show was to be called. She couldn't see the connection with her line of thinking and her future that would patiently unfurl for the next fifteen years. She had screamed things, hateful, wretched things her mother always made her promise she would never say. Filthy freeform that had scalded her tongue far too many times during the term of her captivity. Swore that she could no longer work out the equation in her head; maths not being her thaang. Spurred on by her ranting reflection, the remedy came to her as if on express rails. Logic indisputable.

Throughout the duration of her captivity, as she calls it, her campaign of wars with the demons of design had borne the worst scars. The most instantly recognisable of these being the continued degeneration of her shock-red halo that once so-spherically framed her over-ambitious features as no artist's imagination would allow.

As a school child, mizz Templeton Rice's hair was a fly away masterpiece. The ochred scales of its human medium once drawn out to a wild conflagration that forested the basic scalp. Now, the lamentable attempts of her being to reconstruct the glowing icon was under the close scrutiny of the scissor-happy, their tempering edge denying any extravagance of form of length of texture. A hostile hedge too often coloured, too often crimped, too often tugged at, as now in the silence she was tugging at it. Kneeling on the hardback wooden chair; legs quite dead. Back rigid with frustration at this deaf existence. The interminable Come On I Deserve It Hurt Me Bite Me Make Me Cry Keep Stabbing Stabbing Stabbing Stabbing. Metal marring flesh............